Panic World - Why we always blame video games

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

There’s been a moral panic around video games basically since they first debuted. From too much sex to causing laziness and violence, just about the only thing society and the media have taken seriously about video games since their advent is that they are somehow seriously harmful. Chris Plante joins us today to talk about what causes people (aka parents) to freak out about video games’ influence, and how they actually impact us, both in good and bad ways. Our guest Chris Plante is the co-founder of Polygon and current host of the Post Games podcast — all about how and why we love video games — which you can subscribe to here or wherever you listen to pods. Want to hear Ryan and Chris’s extended conversation? Plus ad-free audio & video episodes, more bonuses and extended episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for our Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Show notes: The secret plan to outlaw porn in the US Your conspiracy families And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Just letting you know before we start today's episode, if you're like, damn, I wish this episode was a little bit longer. You can go to patreon.com slash panic world. And there's some extra minutes of us talking and a bunch of other stuff that exists on our Patreon that you probably know about. And if you're like, I love this show so much, I wish I could show people how much I love this show, but not have to talk to them. Store.com.com. Buy the shirt. Bring us a little bit closer to that hoodie number. The bosses won't tell me how many more we need to sell.

They say it's not my business and to stop asking them and calling them in the middle of the night. Fine. Let's start the episode. I want to start with a really simple, nice question before we get into the horrors of the modern age. What are you playing right now? What's on your list? You play video games? Can I be the biggest asshole on the planet?

I'm playing a game that doesn't have an announcement. It doesn't have a release date. It might come out in like April, my dude. That's what I'm playing right now. I usually don't get to do this. I don't usually get a big dog somebody and come to the show. But let me tell you, I am playing the game of the year of 2026. That is where I live.

What's what kind of game? What console? PC. And let me tell you, what if I said you took match three games and you blended it with some other stuff? Okay, so it's like bejewled? Yeah, that's the way of putting it. Or Candy Crush. But let me tell you, it's heaven.

If you want something more like, what am I playing right now that other people can play, which is like the nice thing and not being a piece of shit. Yeah, be polite. Thank you. It's really hard. Sam's at Blake Manor. That's my like real shit right now. Do you know about this?

I don't. It's going to become very apparent. No. How shallow my video game knowledge is as we go. What if I told you you could play Agatha Chris? Christy story, but most of the racism is stripped out and it's set in Ireland and it's just like a good chill hangout in a spooky mansion. I'm keying in on the term most of the racism is stripped out. Yeah.

I've been doing this long enough friends and I never say all because I'm fully aware that there's something I probably missed. There's no, that's not possible. Is there a lot of reading in this game? Oh, man, so much reading. I'm out. I'm out. They also, they talk it at you too. So if you're okay with them talking to that yet

You have to use audio too Oh yeah they definitely talk it at I have not turned the audio on in a video game in like 10 years I'll be very honest You've been playing match three games Without knowing what they're called my friend I am completely shamelessly addicted right now To Digimon Times Ranger

Dude no joke One of the two shows I do We got hammered by people who are mad That we didn't talk about Digimon They're like I can't believe You talked about this Pokemon piece of shit, you pieces of scum. Honestly, I chose it over the new Pokemon game.

So I'm a massive monster hunter player. Like, I just love catching and raising monsters. And the Digimon series is just like streamlined it into pure crack. My girlfriend was like, you didn't say a word for like three hours. I was like, yeah, because I was raising Digimon. And I completely lost what I was doing in my life. I've been cucked by the Pokemon monsters. You know, actually, I think Digimon had like way more adult themes.

in Pokemon. You've used to twice in two episodes and it's going to be a problem. Keep going. Well, actually, actually, I think this piece of children's media

is way more adult than what you would think. Have you ever seen Stephen Universe? Yeah, I think Stephen Universe is way more adult themes than people give it credit for. I am the

Digimon Master, the Digimon Tamer, Ryan Broderick. And with me, as always, is the Pocomaster Grant Irving. He wants to be the champion, the very best. And this is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually

reality. And joining us today, host of post games, Chris Plant. I don't know what they call it in like the pal world. I was trying to keep it in theme. Like I was going to give you. But I think it's such a copyright rip off. They don't have a term for like what you do in Powell world. Like, you're just like a guy, I guess.

You're the pal world guy. And today, we're talking. we're talking about video games. We're talking about the moral panic around video games. But to start, I would love to hear about your new show. Because I feel like it's been a while since I've checked in on you. I want to hear everything that's going on. So what are you working on right now?

Sure, yeah. I used to work at this company called Vox Media. And I legally am not going to talk about that company. And now I, yeah, I finally went independent. I did what you did and what Casey did and what all the smart people do, which is rather than make a thing, and found it and run it for 10 years, make a thing, and then own it yourself. And then if it bombs, blame yourself, which I'm totally okay with.

Fortunately, it's not bombing. You got to run it until the people working for you, try to unionize, and then you've got to be like, I'm out actually. I'm just really curious why you didn't list Maddie Euglesis on the list of smart people and speaking of Vox when you're saying people start their own company. I've never heard that name. Oh, interesting. I always, oh, no, it's pronounced Maddie Glacis.

Oh, I think, I think I'm familiar. I actually did think it was that for a long time. I thought his name, I thought he was an adult man who went by Maddie. I thought it was Maddie Glacier. It's pretty lovable name, honestly. Like, that's like a good teddy. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's better. Yeah.

So yeah, so how is the indie world treating you? It is so good. I mean, making a weekly podcast about video games, it's like, hey, what if I do the thing that I always griped about, which is why do mainstream publications not take video games seriously? Hey, I'll just go do an NPR style show. And I can interview smart people each week and I can make that thing every damn week. And it turns out there's like an audience for it.

There's a million video game podcast. Like literally, I think a million and three was the last count. But there are not many for people over the age of like 35 that also treat the people listening like they are over the age of 35. Also, like I imagine you're not a white nationalist. So that's got to be like a pretty unique. niche in the world of video games. It puts me above like at least 999,000. So, you know, sure. Yeah, you're really in the top 1%. Um, and you actually approached us for today's topic. It is a topic that we've kicked around a little bit. And we, we've kind of gone back in time on

this show a bit, uh, but not a ton. I'm fascinated by this period of time because it's, it's sort of right, right around when I was sort of becoming aware of the world and sort of, the media environment that I that we were all growing up in and so uh I want I want you to kind of talk about why you chose this topic and why it's it's fascinating to you sure I mean so the topic is do video games cause violence and it's fascinating to me because it just never goes away people think it goes away but what I find uh so I don't know wonderful about it because now it's kind of been neutered in terms of its risk to actual video games is that it's It so nicely reflects whatever the politics are of its moment.

So, like, whether that is, like, the very beginning with, like, death race, or that is the early 1990s, where it is the, you know, congressional freakouts over, like, two live crew, or it is right. I would say the school shooting era, which is, like, lasted for a very long time. There's always a different version of this. And it's always rooted in the same, not just like pseudoscience, but all the science, I'm sure as we will talk about, is rooted an entirely separate claim. Like there is a conversation about aggression and there is a conversation about violence. And yet it always gets mush together in really kind of perverse ways. Tangentially related to this, I heard this great anecdote this week about the beginnings of PBS and how at the very beginning. beginning, PBS was advertising itself as a way to hypnotize your children as a positive.

Cool. Because children were so unruly and annoying. And this was like, you know, the age where like children were not human beings and you like wanted them to be seen and not heard. And so the earliest PBS promotion was like, we figured out how to make children finally watch TV because that like children were not watching TV. Yeah. And they very quickly scrapped that because like obviously people started to get really

creeped out by that. But in the very beginnings, PBS was like, we'll hypnotize your children. children for you so they'll pay like they'll sit down and and i and i think it's very funny because that feeling of like what is like media doing to children is changing as video games are emerging yeah so like you enter the 80s and you get this like the beginnings of what we would call like helicopter parenting it's it's sort of starting but it's starting in kind of in different directions and i before we delve into the history of all this i wanted to throw a take at you and get your thoughts because i this is sort of my lens through which i

I view all debates around the larger world of video games and extremism, which is that I believe that things like Gamergate, the sort of like radicalizing pipelines that you've heard about in video game communities for years are essentially one to one to something like soccer hooliganism. Explain that a little bit more, yeah. Basically, like, to me, and we're going to get into this story today, there are. Oasis? Yeah, they're all about loving Oasis. No, so they, it's all about track suits and bull cuts and not looking back in anger to look back at this anger. It is very fascinating to me that we spent effectively 20 years, almost 30 years, complaining, worrying, fretting, trying to legislate this idea that video games cause aggression. And right when the right wing figures out how to actually infiltrate these spaces and turn them into extremist movements, a lot of that

stuff starts to fall away. And if we're talking about sort of a grand theory of like, what do video games do to you, my argument would be almost nothing that is different from any other sport or maybe even interest being a radicalizing vector for young people. Yes, I definitely agree with that. I agree specifically with the take on the aggression side of it. I think the science proves that out that whenever you do look at research on video games causing aggression, not violence, but aggression, it's both not significant and not insignificant. It does create some sort of feeling, not unlike watching sports or watching cartoons. Like, those are your comparisons.

And I think where that comparison that you're making with something like soccer hooliganism is just where are young people? Like, that's the story, right? Young people are in sports in the 80s and 90s. Young people are in video games in the last 10 to 15 years. Why are young people, especially young men, aggregating here? Because it's the core interest. And it's just like the law of numbers. Right.

If there is an alternate reality where comic books become the dominant, I mean, technically like, yes, this is happening and did happen. It's like whatever the emergent popular media form is creates those bubbles that can cause radicalization, can can lead to aggression and goes back to a. a premise that Grant and I have talked about on the show before, which is the idea that we need to have federally mandated masculinity lifeguards to be in all male spaces. So right now, we're at the limit. Three men, I think, should be the legal limit of men that can be around each other without a masculinity life. Sure. And then once you hit four, you have to have someone from the government com licensed

and make sure you don't spin off into some sort of white supremacist cult. I mean, if you're bringing in someone from the government, I think you might actually get the opposite result right now. But maybe someone else's government. Maybe another country's guard. Oh, it's a UN watchdog. Oh. It's a UN appointed masculinity lifeguard that comes in and basically just helps men not spiral out of control while talking about what they're interested in.

Can you help me pictureize what are they wearing? They wear the blue helmet. They wear the blue helmet. I'm just imagining like an HR person with a cold who like really doesn't want to be there. but it's just always like, can you guys, can you guys please come down? Can then like I'm going to need some eye statement right now. And there's like a whistle.

I was imagining like a literal soldier with a gun. I was imagining like a heavily armed UN soldier just who comes into your apartment once the fourth man enters with them. And they're like, okay, you guys can hang out now. But I'm going to be over in the corner. And if you start to get crazy, I'm going to pop around off. You get one warning shot next. Yeah, you got one warning shot and then we're, then it's off to the Hague with you. Okay, so let's get into our story.

And our story starts in November, 1985. We've done this research for you today. And we're going to talk about how we became convinced the video games cause aggression. The story starts with Tipper Gore, Al Gore's wife. She leads a campaign in the mid-80s that influences the recording industry Association of America, the R-I-A-A to agree to a parental advisory label put on music that's sold in the U.S. And that sets the stage for today's villain. Are you familiar with a man named Jack Thompson?

We go way back, you know, me and Jack, we are buddies. I'm very familiar with Jack, but I'm very curious how you talk about this wonderful Florida man. So our outline here says, hung like a moose, cool guy. Please don't sell us is what it says. Yeah, so 1990, Jack Thompson. Spoilers. 1990, Jack Thompson, a lawyer and Republican politician for Florida,

starts a similar campaign based off of Tipper Gore's with the idea of trying to ban explicit music entirely. I do feel like that effectively has happened in a way. Like, we have algorithmically sort of ruined. That's a whole other episode to talk. about. Jack Thompson focuses on trying to bring obscenity charges to two live crew. Are you familiar with two live crew? I mean, some of the greatest music of the 1980s, you know. Spring break music is, I think, uh, the energy. I think that's right. Like, very pornographic. I was going to say, are you going to

quote some lyrics? Did you bring that? No, I'm not. Um, although I have been sitting on a take for a while about the concept of like straight camp and how like we used to have this like very over sexualized, like straight mainstream media like kind of culminating with bloodhound game and then like that all kind of went away in an interesting way and I'm like curious like what caused it anyways um I mean you do gooners already that's I think gooners you think woke killed it no gooning is not that really gooning is actually I think trying to fill the vacuum of that whereas if you had something sort of disgusting and heterosexual in the mainstream media you know something like two live crew or bloodhound gang maybe we wouldn't need to goon anyways

So they go to trial, two live crew wins. Thompson, even though he loses, gets a lot of attention and is hired by Oliver North's far right freedom alliance in 1992. We have been doing the same shit in this country since the very beginning. It is so annoying. And then Thompson spends most of the 90s going after various musicians, movies studios, entertainers. How did you first come across, Mr. Thompson? How do you know that? I mean, like, very first time hearing about him as an adult.

I guess a teenager was like the Grand Theft Auto controversies. He goes very, very hard on Grand Theft Auto. But what I find so interesting about him in that he fits into the long line of school shooting inspires people to lose their minds about video games. And like that's like for me, the curiosity of him is like he has this same genesis as so many of these people. Yeah. He doesn't really focus on video games until the late 90s. That's when he kind of realizes he can latch on to this. And in April 1999, he appears in court and blames video games for the first time saying that

a shooter who watched natural-born killers also played Doom in Mortal Kombat. And this is what the New York Times writes at the time. The parents of three students killed at a Kentucky high school filed a $130 million lawsuit today against the entertainment industry. named in the lawsuit filed in federal district court. Here were two internet pornography sites, several computer game companies, and the makers and distributors of a 1990 film featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. We intend to hurt Hollywood, said Jack Thompson, one of the parents' lawyers.

We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt sex porn sites. And as for why he chose these things. Specifically, the article goes on. One scene in the basketball diaries shows a dream sequence in which the main character, played by Mr. DiCaprio, guns down his teacher and some of the classmates. The suit also asserts that Michael Carniel, the shooter, was an average computer user who logged on to internet pornography sites to view sexually violent material.

This is literally the conversations we're still having today. We had these conversations about Charlie Kirk's shooter like two months ago. Yeah. Sex pornography, mixed with video games, mixed with anything else that is not guns or psychology. And that desperate sort of desire to pull whatever's in the thing. the zeitgeist into the moral panic. So it's this guy who got his start trying to ban explicit music is like, well, the new thing's video games. And we want to hurt popular culture in general.

So we're just going to build this like giant catamari of all the things in culture that were, that are new and interesting, and we're going to blame those. And that same month, we entered effectively the modern age of America. April, 1999 is when the Columbine shooting happens, which you alluded to just a minute ago. And it emerges that the shooters were fans of Doom and Quake and had custom mods of the game on their personal website. And the New York Times writes again, the files on Harris's, Doom and Quake exploits,

contained programs. He had written to work with the games. Listening to them to describe what a mod is in 1999, is kind of wild. As well as his commentary on them. But despite coming in the context of computer games famous for their realistic violence, Realistic is doing a lot of work there described doom.

I'm going to say these files scattered with enthusiastic observations and exclamation points provided a glimpse at a teenager who seemed less angry and morbid than in the other postings attributed to him. It took me about 10 hours to finish this level. So send some comments to me once in a while, Harris wrote in one file dated November 26, 1996. His comments accompanied a program that he made available to the public on an internet site. Can I say

Loser shit all around This is the most Benign take in the world The Columbine Shooters suck shit Column Biden, you're saying Columbine bad in the shooter's losers But losers of Congrats you spent 10 hours making a Fod

That sucks And also like losers because Do you know about like They read the Doom novels And like that's what they had like Novels based on Doom? They, like Harris had named his shotgun after a character in the Doom novels. Wow.

That's true loser shit, actually. True loser shit and also true, uh, where was, where was the novel pushback, you know? Like, where, where we were in the hearing books. We should ban all books. We should ban books. I agree, especially ones about video games, I think. But, uh, but, uh, it might be a break of time. Yeah, yeah, but this is something that we see a lot, and we've talked about a lot on this show, which is if you go through any of these shooters backstories, and I've sort of reached the point where I'm comfortable saying that like any mass shooter is a political extremist.

It's just that their political ideology is a little more amorphous and confusing than someone who's, you know, it's, yeah, I think so. And so if you go through any of these people's history, yes, you're going to find that they spent a lot of time online because they didn't have a lot of personal connections. and you're going to find that they were very fascinated with connecting the live wires of popular culture to political violence and extremism and violence. That is a very classic idea. It is unfortunate that every time, you know, we could have a conversation about how that works. You get people like Jack Thompson who just go like, well, no, no, no, this is what made them do it. It's not other much more complicated conversations you could be having.

It's the fact that he read a book based on the video game, Doom. Yeah. Yeah, it sucks. I'm also like, and this is, okay, I'm not charmed by Columbine. I want to be clear. Dude. I really came on the wrong episode, dude. But I am charmed. I find it fascinating to see echoes of how we currently use the internet and talk about this stuff in older sort of sources.

We come across this a lot. We're like, we'll dig up something from the 90s. And it's like, oh, wow. They were talking and talking on and using the internet in almost exact same ways we are now. And so the fact that like a Columbine shooter effectively has what would be said out loud in a Twitch stream now in a text file on his website to download his doom mod or whatever of like, of this young person like using the internet to try to talk to other people.

And even saying like, this took me a while, like leave a comment. You know, it seems so modern in the. this really weird way. Yes, I completely agree. And like the whole thing at that point was people are using Doom mods to recreate their homes in their schools. One of the best games that came out last year was a game called MyHouse.Wod that is a mod of a home that is a fictional story about a person, a teenager who passed away and they

recreated their house and now you can go explore it. So like we're still as an art form tinkering with that. I also think it's telling that what came out game-wise right after Columbine. It was doing similar things. I don't know if you ever played Pico's school. Do you know about this? I know of it. Yeah, I never played it.

Describe it. Basically a school shooting happens. This is a new ground's like point and click adventure game. A school shooting happens. And then you have to hunt the school shooters when you wake up. in the school and then it's like aliens i can't remember sure and then also super columbine massacre r pg which was a r pg maker game that was trying to like kind of grapple with this are either these games great i'm i think there's been kind of a revisionist history to make super columbine massacre

or more like a piece of art than i think it really is but yes it's this weird thing that we're We're seeing even now where the Charlie Kirk killing happens and then right away, people are like, I got to make it into a game on Roblox. Right. You know. Fun fact, I was a very, very big RPG maker user and I spent the better part of a year trying to make a top-down 2D version of Kingdom Hearts. And I downloaded custom sprite maps for all the characters to basically turn it into a turn-based

RPG on RPG. Fun fact. It's weird that I didn't know. this lore about you and yet it feels like I did. It feels like it was all right. I eventually moved on to Mujin, which is like an Italian open source to the fighting simulator like like emulator kind of thing where you can load your custom sprites into that. And that's actually how it ended up actually learning C++ for a little bit because I was making

like these fighting games where like I could have like a Gundam fighting Spider-Man. Sorry. For the people whose brands are like mine, can you unpack the Charlie Kirk Roblox? thing uh i sure yeah basically what you don't want to hear about my kingdom park RPG that i was making to ryan's point that the internet is different and then the exact same as it always was it was shocking when um columbine happened and then people were like oh they were making these experiences in the game and then they were making experiences in games inspired by this tragic incident right and meanwhile today it's like that's already

happening. People are making grotesque things in games before and after they happen, whether that is like streaming an event live while it's happening or whether it is, again, the moment after it being like, I got to turn this into some hot content. We are always very scandalized. It's interesting. Like the newer the media, the type, the more scandalized by how people use it to process, sort of, extreme emotion. So like if you were to write a book about Columbine, an alternate, honestly, like Bobcat Galthwaite's world's greatest dad. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was actually just taught, I was trying to describe this movie to somebody the other day and I was like, okay, so there's a movie where Robin Williams gets totally completely naked. And it's basically about a kid who like does autoerotic exfixiation. It's the spy kid's kid. It's an insane movie. But like there, there are movies about school shootings. There are comedies about school shootings. The, the,

the Nirvana the band group. The Uglies? Is that what it was called? I think it's called the Uglies. Yeah. Like, and that wasn't really even acceptable until like, you know, maybe 10 years ago. But if you were at a book about a school shooting,

I don't think anyone would bat an eye. And the fact that, you know, we now have people, you know, in the early 2000s starting to experiment with like talking about really serious material in the form of a video game. Still to this day, I think makes people uncomfortable. I mean, I don't think it's an accident that the video game at the center of Gamergate It was called Depression Quest, and it was like a woman trying to, like, talk through, like, a very serious mental health concept. And it's like, so the newer the media type, the more we feel like it's off limits from touching, like, really, it has to stay frivolous.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at the same time, it is the scariest thing in the world, and it's so important. And anything attributed to it is dangerous. Right. So it's both like we don't want it to say anything. And also, if it does say anything, it is somehow going to turn our kids into cold blood. killers. And at this time period that we're talking about, the media environment weirdly is probably the closest to today's in terms of being weirdly fragmented, not really having a sense of a very

sort of oral narrative rather than written. I've been looking at this time period a lot recently because I do think it's almost exactly like what it is now where you just like can't keep track of what's happening and you're generating so many urban legends and rumors because you have this fractured media environment. And so you end up with the urban legend. that the Columbine shooters had created a mod of their high school for practice, which best we can tell there's no evidence that that was one of the mods. And this leads directly to backlash to the video game industry, as Salon writes at the time, over on Usenet at alt.games.quake2,

gamers scoffed at the inaccuracies of the media reports and joke sarcastically that their gaming habits could turn them too into sociopaths. One poster complained about TV reports that said, they learned how to use pipe bombs and grenades from Doom. Doom doesn't even have pipe bombs or grenades. And, you know, once again, this idea of, like, everything that's old is still new. Like, we saw the same sort of shit posting within, like, the trans community around the Charlie Kirk shooting where it was like a bunch of trans people being like, I'm going to take my

Charlie Kirk like injection, my Charlie Kirk killer injection now. You know, that kind of, it is always sort of the young people who are misreported on kind of scoffing laughing at it, but then the media, I think, very straight-facedly looking back at that and being like, they're not even taking this seriously. You know, it's such a weird cycle that we're still in with this stuff. It's still happening. I mean, as I said at the very top, right, is like, we are now 30 to 40 years into video game hysteria.

There are people who, in theory, play video games at the New York Times at the Washington Post, and yet you would not know it most of the time these things still get reported. I think they keep them in like some kind of room. Like I think all the video game writers in your Times are like in a padded room in the back and they don't let them out, you know? Because God knows like no one at the Times is talking to them about any of this stuff. Thank God for Gene Park at the Washington Post. Last man standing over there in terms of like maybe helping them understand this stuff.

But most major papers, you're right, do not still are doing this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to talk about how your buddy, Jack Thompson, enters the story right after. a word from our sponsors, dare. Keep your children off drugs by teaching them exactly what the drugs look like and where to find them. You got to do mine later.

I'm proud of this one. Which one was yours? It's down in the document. You'll get there. Okay. This is a little teaser for my fake ad. Oh, I see it. That's good.

Yeah. I'll use that one next. Okay, cool. Jack Thompson, he gets real big off this, right? He does. Like he's based It's like his Columbine is like real big for Jack Thompson

And he's basically arguing The video games are school shooting simulators From Alabama baptist.org in 2006 They write Jack Thompson The attorney who represented the parents Of three teenagers killed In the Paducah Kentucky school shooting In 1997 is continuing his efforts

After violent video games Because of their influence on unstable youth One of his main concerns now Is the October release of bully Do you remember You're bully? Yes. Bully is, I wish it was a series, but it was just a one-off game from Rockstar back when

they made those things, not just Red Dead Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto. And Bully, you could think of it kind of like, I mean, this is like a very Jack Thomas way of putting it. It's Grand Theft Auto in a private school. He calls it a Columbine simulator. Yeah, exactly. Great. It's really, it's just a story of being a kid in a school.

It's not so different than basically any other 1980s. kind of, I don't know, high school movie. You're not shooting people. You're not doing any of the rock star stuff. I think they kind of latch down to the fact that he has like a baseball bat on the cover. Yeah. He's a bad thing. And of course, school shootings continue throughout the 2000s.

And Jack Thompson keeps using that as a way to sort of plug his worldview. And this is, Grant's going to pull this up. This is a clip of him on the cable news in 2007. following the Virginia Tech shooting. Typically, the school shooters train literally on video games to do this. Dawson College last year, Montreal. The shooter, the killer trained on a game called Super Columbine Massacre. Also Postal 2, both of which are murder simulation games in which the school shooters can rehearse

and plan for and make themselves more efficient in these kind of murderous rampages. You perked up at a couple of the games you mentioned there. talk of a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, we already talked about Super Columbine massacre, but Postal 2, I actually agree with Jack Thompson. That game should be banned because it sucks. This is a bad game. Postal 1 is the basis of my favorite movie, Postal,

which opens with a window, which, yeah, which opens with a window washer on one of the Twin Towers, I believe. One of the most, like, offensive movies ever made kind of thing. Yeah, Postal was the something awful made into a video game of its era. It's Edge Lord shit. The, what I love about this take is it explains why I have won the Super Bowl three years in a row because I played a lot of Madden and it made me very efficient and talented at playing football. If it's hard for people who don't remember video games of this era and first person shooters. It wasn't like the skill call of duty stuff of today.

Not that that is also going to train you to be a shooter. This is like clumsy ass barely moving around with like a X, Y, and Z axis. Right. To, you know, you in postal like, I don't know, piss on a mailman or something. Yeah, Supercom by massacre looks like Zelda on the S&E. like again for visuals here like that's what these games look like yeah and it's like very clear that this is part of a right wing culture war that he's whipping up he's also very shameless about it and he he even writes after this in a letter i went on mbc's today show and predicted columbine one week

before it happened which is like you know that's like that's like not even something like a guy on substack would right now, you know, like, like, that's like below that level of discourse of like, I'm a, you know, talking head pundit, you know, garbage. The Babe Ruth of school shootings. Like, yeah, I, I'm, I'm 10 for 10 on predicting school shootings. And it's like, well, then maybe you should tell people about, you know, where they're going to happen if you can really predict school shootings. And, and this is the, this is the sad thing.

And once again, this is something I think we see a lot with like pulling back these moral panics, which is that there is something real happen. which is the rise of school shootings in America. And then there are people who respond to this very real problem. I think we talked about this with the climate change episode where it's like there are people who recognize what's happening. And instead of focusing on figuring out what's actually causing it, access to guns, alienation of young people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, there's a million things you can point to. It's like, well, I'm going to go after the thing that supports my preexisting sort of political beliefs or or my desire to control the minds of young Americans or whatever it is. And it's so frustrating because like Jack Thompson is clearly, you know, he clearly cares about what is happening here, but he's so fixated on this simple, easy solution that just, you know, puts people back in churches or removes, you know, anti-religious art or whatever, you know, whatever he cares about. Do you think people really believe what they're selling here?

This is the part that like I just, I can't get into other people's heads, but I just always come back to, do people really deep down inside believe that it's not guns or it's not mental health, that it's video games or comic books, you know, 40 years ago or whatever? Or do they know that they're protecting the thing that they love,

the thing that they love their guns is actually, harmful, but they just don't want to accept that. I think about this a lot, especially with like right-wing grifters. You know, I think there's this prevalence on the left in particular to assume that everyone on the right is the cynical arch kind of like, I'm making this thing up. And I just don't think people are, the majority of people are good enough to operate like that for that long. So if I see someone like Jack Thompson, who has spent 30 years basically blaming everything

other than guns for school shootings and the moral decay of young Americans or whatever. I just sort of believe you think that. I think you can convince yourself of anything. You know, like, I need my gun. I don't need video games. Well, I also think, like, a lot of Americans like us, Americans who have, you know, been to college or live in major cities or work in the media, I think we do tend to forget that, like, a big bulk of this country sees popular culture as a foreign entity that is entering. their homes in some way. I think this is a lot about the anti-woke backlash of the 2010s where they're like every celebrity is a person of color and now there's no white people on TV and it's like,

well, yeah, you might actually think that if you view all of popular culture as this other thing that you're not connected to. You got to stand your ground. It's on your property now, you know? You're joking, but I think that that is a bit of the psychology here where it's like, okay, video games didn't exist five years ago. Now my kid wants one and I don't know what they are. And then there's a guy like Jack Thompson who's on TV saying, well, actually they're going to make you aggressive. And you're like, well, that actually makes sense because I don't know anything about this. And this bothers me and scares me. And when I see the video games, there's like cartoon blood or whatever it is.

And that is sort of the psychological profile. I tend to believe in for a lot of these people. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of skip to the end there, which is the best thing you can do as a parent is spend time with your kids and actually. I was going to say give them violent video games to play alone. Hey, that's a my point. They just watch me do it.

And they're like, Mortal Kombat, that's scary. And then they watch it and they're like, oh, no, you're going to be fine. This is dumb shit. Parents, if you're listening, if you give your children violent video games, let them play them alone in their bedroom.

They will turn out to be a podcaster. So do not do that. Give them PPS. It will hypnotize them and they'll not be able to look away. I think one thing just very quickly to add to your question is just, I think it's very easy to believe things, especially when it gives you, the ability to go on cable TV.

It gives you money and it gives you a crusade. People's capabilities to griff themselves, I think gets overlooked. I think it's easy to be a true believer when you only get reinforcement and an enemy to attack. Go for it, right? I just think that it's an important part

in helping me understand how somebody could ever brag about Columbine. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. It is a self-perpetuating cycle, for sure. And as the 2000s progress, we see more and more of this sort of thing. We see video games popping up in murder trials.

With the Virginia Tech shooter, they try the same lines. It's later discovered he only liked Sonic, which is obviously not a shooter game, but, I mean, look, there's no normal Sonic player, so maybe they were onto something there. So, like, that does make sense to me that you would have some sort of deviant brain shape if you like Sonic the Hedgehog. And then, of course, we get to what I would argue is, even, more so than Columbine. I don't know, Charlie, I think I've brought this up in the show before, but writer Charlie

Warsall, friend of the show, has often argued that, like, Sandy Hook is the moment we gave up on trying to fix the school shooting problem. So, like, if you view Columbine and Sandy Hook as this moment where, like, if there were less Jack Thompson's in the world, we may have actually solved it, but we didn't. So now this is just the world we live in. And so Sandy Hook happens at the end of January 2012. And of course, the brother of the shooter is misidentified. My bad, it was my first day on a news desk.

I was one of the reporters that did that. And my bad, I got pilloried, yeah. But he liked Mass Effects. Like he liked the page on Facebook. So Fox News kind of whipped up a whole friend's year on that. And then the fucking NRA blames video games for shootings. And then right after that, we head into the Navy Yard shooting in, you know, 2013. once again video games are involved and I guess like what I'm fascinated by with all of this is how

you sort of mentioned it in the top of the show this this idea that there is sort of two two things happening here like the idea of blaming video games for school shootings and the idea of blaming video games for aggression would you say that one appeared before the other would you say that they're intertwined have changed over time because like looking at this like laid out like this it just feels like it's the same thing every single thing time but do you feel like the the larger national discourse the larger moral panic around video games has evolved in some way from 2003 to 2013 2000 I do I think there's a huge thing that happens right before Sandy Hook and I think it changes the calculus on all of

this which is Brown versus Entertainment Merchants Association is argued in the Supreme Court in 2010 it is decided in mid 2011 and Brown versus Entertainment Merchants Association basically is the core legal text of why video games are protected from all of this. It's a seven to decision. It strikes on this California law that banned the sales of violent games to children. I think it was under 18 without parent supervision. And the most important part is that in the majority opinion, Scalia says speech about violence is not obscene. And that is like, those words, I think even more than the idea of like games are protected under First Amendment rights are crucial because it sets a precedent for not just video games, but all sorts of other media, right?

If violent speech is not obscene, then it can't be struck down by obscenity laws. So you have this protection that is granted to video games. And you know what people love really going after is a thing that they can take a really high horse on, but then isn't actually going to have any impact because then their video game publishers will still donate to them because it's like, whatever. Like we're freaking out about it, but it's not going to do anything. This is a thing. I grew up in Missouri and right on the Kansas border. And I would always hear about this with, and now it's terrible and sad, but with abortion, where it was like, oh, we run on this knowing. that we're never going to change it.

Well, surprise, they did. But I think that because that becomes law in mid-2011, then it becomes a really easy thing to target without fear of actually having any big impact. So I think that's the big difference. I think the other big difference is there's just more school shootings, you know? It's kind of amazing how often video games come up in the discourse immediately. after, still even into the late 2010s, because after Parkland, President Trump holds a video game

summit with the executives and major publishers. This touches on a rumor that I had heard at the time, and I suppose we could talk about a little bit, which is, so the New York Times writes, the president said some content viewed by his 11-year-old son, Baron had surprised him. The video games, the movies, the internet stuff is so violent. It's so incredible. I see it. I look at some of the things he's watching, and I say, how is that possible?

And this is what kids are watching. And I think maybe you have to take a look at it. I have heard that that was Barron really loving Fortnite. That makes a lot more sense to me that he would be less worried about violence and more worried about his child not pursuing something that is financially gainful. Yeah, I suppose now he loves it because, like, you know, Fortnite is a great pathway into like, you know, finding unstable. men to make means for them. So this, the meeting following the Parkland shooting,

I just find to be one of like the iconic Trump moments for a few reasons. One, targeting video games is so perfectly Trump in that it is something that was big in the 90s. He's largely been decided and yet he didn't get the memo and he's just like rehashing stuff that he remembers watching or reading the New York Post in like 1996. Two, the meeting that they have is like shortly after the shooting. And Sarah Huckabee mentioned this meeting during a press conference.

And then immediately all the game publishers were like, what? Like nobody, nobody called us. This is going to be like two or three days. They had to reach out the other way to like figure out what this meeting was. And then of course, like the meeting happens. And then basically from like it was a closed door meeting, but all reports. are game publishers get yelled at by some critics and then it spins wildly off track. People start talking about how we need to have these meetings for like film and TV.

Everyone gets distracted. Marco Rubio is in that meeting and they find him afterwards. The press does like, hey, you know, what's up? And Marco Rubio, who is representing Florida is like, eh, doesn't mean much. Video games don't cause violence. We just need to make sure parents are aware of, you know, like parent support tools. So it's all immediately washed over within the course of a week. That's so, so funny.

Yeah, I feel like that was a good time in our story to talk about the evidence that this is all kind of garbage, right? So this is from the New York Times. Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University, led the committee that developed the policy statement. So this is the policy statement that basically comes out after this summit. In an interview on Monday, he said the evidence was clear that violent video games are not a risk factor for serious acts of aggression. Neither are violent movies nor other forms of media. The data on bananas causing suicide is about conclusive. He said, literally the numbers work out about the same.

Can I ask a serious question there? Yeah. When they say bananas cause suicide, did they mean eating bananas? Or do they mean people purposely dropping them on the floor, Looney Tunes style, and then intentionally trying to... I assume it's both. I assume... I actually watched a guy do a full, almost flip fall after stepping up banana peel. It was...

No, it was my buddy Jim. We were out one night, and he stepped on a banana peel, and he slipped, and he went up in the air, and he came down on his back, and we all just stood there in complete disbelief that it happened. It was amazing. when we did the tie pot episode and we briefly talked about the banana peel challenge which was people trying to slip on purpose i lost like a good hour of my life of just watching those videos like but but back to the back to dr ferguson's thing here this is kind of for me the the end of any conversation around the like internet dopamine stuff that everyone's obsessed with right now like there's just not a lot of evidence that like media can really hijack your brain the way we like to think it can. Obviously, there are social behaviors that are downstream of the media you consume. We know this.

But if video games can't turn you into a school shooter, then I'm not sure I totally buy the argument that like what you see on TikTok can turn you into a political extremist in a way. It's hard to gel those two things together. And it kind of goes back to my, we always tend to freak out about the newest media type and what we do with it. And there's this massive amount of discourse right now around like, oh yeah, like you've got to go on a, the amount of YouTubers is they're like, you have to buy a notebook and journal in it to like reset your dopamine receptors. And it's like, what the fuck are you talking about? What are you talking about? It is this thing that just continues to come around over and over and over again.

And just to throw one more study at this before we go to a break. The Washington Post found similarly in 2012 that if video games could cause real life violence and aggression, they were so popular and it becomes so popular so quickly that the amount of violence and aggression we would see in society would be out of good. The purge. We would be living in the purge. We would be living in the purge. Which might be a good ideology. I mean, you know who would love the idea of the purge? Our next sponsor, which Grant put in here in the dock, the NRA, will be right back.

Just to put a cap on this as we kind of take this thing home, we've kind of known this. Like, we've known that, like, you don't really get, like, brainwashed into being a new human being based on the media you consume. And to really drive this home, I want to bring back our friend Jack Thompson one more time. Thompson does this song and dance, even when it's glaringly obvious, that something much darker was happening. For instance, 2003, a 16-year-old in Ohio on trial for murder initially claims insanity with his parents saying Grand Theft Auto 3 drove him to do it.

From World Net Daily, quoting this teenage killer, I killed Joe Lynn from my own personal satisfaction. I yearn to see blood. It's a need or an addiction. Whomever else believes the GTA 3 influenced me to brutally kill Joe Lynn, they are all idiots. So no matter of the specifics, after teens do something deranged, pun and treat easily and quickly becomes finger pointing. And here's a quote, I think really sums up this whole gross indiscence. So in 2007, Jason Delaroca, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, it's so sad.

These massacre chasers, they're worse than ambulance chasers. They're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox. And like that to me is really the story of all of this, which is that instead of reckoning with the violent and antisocial and alienating culture of 21st century America, we just created in a new industry of people who go on TV and tell you that like, whatever. ever's popular with kids like caused it yeah can't give you my hot take like my like super hot take i don't think video games cause violence but i do think video games can influence your belief systems and i feel like that is what's weirdly overlooked like how many people play a version of sim city or sim tower or those games and then want to go on and be city organizers Not because, like, oh, they want to literally move around pieces on a board, but because they

learned about a passion and then it got them reading more and it inspired something within them. Like, I would have concerns about a game that is, let's say, the triumph of the will of video games, right? That is like a celebration of white nationalism. So I think there are conversations to be had. I think in the same way that I am frustrated whenever a school shooting happens and people blame blanket video games instead of, hey, let's talk about the literal things, the guns, right? The mental health.

It goes the same way with video game conversations where we're talking about violence, which is so amorphous, when we could talk about, hey, we are literally creating slot machines and giving them to children over and over and over again. It's not like we're teaching them how a theory of gambling works. We're literally giving them gambling. And it's not, I'm saying that, like, that is bad or good. It's just weird how little energy goes into worrying about these things that should be researched versus a thing that is, again, we've had the argument for 40 years. Like, let's just have a different argument.

First, yes, I agree. And I think what, you know, tell me if I'm wrong, it sounds like what you're arguing is that there are things that we are predisposed to. And I mean, we've, we've used this metaphor before. It's like, I can have a beer and not go on a bender. And there are people who can't. So there are obviously things that we are predisposed to. And I can watch really offensive art and come away fine. Like, I'm not going to watch Triumph of the Will.

And they'd be like, that was great. I believe this. This is my thing now. But there are people who can't because of the way that they are wired or the way that they were raised or the environment that they're in. And so it is probably most likely, I think the most charitable read on all of this is a, is a real horse before the cart kind of situation where it's like if you are someone who is on the track to become violent and aggressive and hurt people, you're going to encounter video games

the same way another kid who is not on that track would. And that's going to determine how you interface with those video games. It's going to determine what video games you're interested in, what they reinforce. And that is, I think, the same for a Facebook feed, the same for a TikTok feed, the same for the music you listen to. It is all kind of building the operating system of who you are. And so the fact that the Columbine shooters were interested in video games and were on message boards talking about doing like weird niche stuff with your video games as a way to sort of find connection with other people. people, that makes total sense to me. Yes.

And it makes total sense to me that you can do that and not become a school shooter too. Yes. I agree with all of that. And then I also would just add that if we're going to continue to research games, research the things that we literally already have proven are risky or dangerous or bad elsewhere. We know the effects of gambling. We know the effects of marketing, right? So then why are we not having a conversation about, say, the partnerships between arms corporations and weapons manufacturers with a call of duty or a battlefield and like actual licensing in a game?

Do they, I don't know. Do they still have those enlistment trucks where like you go on as a little kid and you play like call of duty in like a in a truck sponsored by the army? Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, yes. Or yeah, and then America's Army. There's. Yeah. There are so many conversations to be had.

And they are tied to research that we already have seen outside of games and is rooted in some sort of truth and is specific. But I think that is, I mean, it gets to so much of your show, the death of specificity, the need for the answer to just be a thing. Right. And that is the problem that just continues to lurch around the video game violence conversation. It's also, I mean, something that I've definitely been thinking about a lot recently because a project I'm working on. currently, the complications around right-wing social control. And you can see it right now with the schism happening after Charlie Kirk's death and Nick Fuentes ascending to sort of the top of the heap. And to me, that is like such an obvious display of how difficult it is for the right-wing to control

social behavior in the exact way they want. The Army would be another great way where it's like, we want to indoctrinate kids into joining the Army by putting them on a true. truck when they're not even 18 years old and letting them play video games with soldiers. But if they take those guns into a classroom, that's bad. And it's like, well, that's a really, really hard line to walk in the same way that they're like, we want to like have all of our supporters posting racist edge lord memes. But the minute they start photoshopping Charlie Kirk's face on a Japanese porn clip, that's apparently a step too far.

And it's like, well, that's a really hard line to keep people on. And so you see this even in the 90s with Jack Thompson where it's like, we want to ban all explicit art. But I guarantee you, if you went back in a little time machine and you asked Jack Thompson like, well, what about, you know, this piece of racist filmmaking from the 50s or whatever? You'd be like, well, that's probably fine. You know, or like the sort of evangelical Christian background. Like, that's really fine. But it's about sort of maintaining this very strict line to keep people on. And the modern world, I think, has just made that infinitely more complicated for the right because these behaviors don't exist in a vacuum.

Do we have time for me to ask my one big question for you? Yes. It's like the future. How does the GOP have it both ways? So the future of this is you have the Gamergate contingency that has played a serious role in creating the Trump coalition or inspiring it, I guess you could say, and still around it. And then at the same time, you will have them now and then say that video games are the devil or porn is the devil or anime and hentai are the devil. Those things are. That is true.

Sure, sure. It's this weird thing of you're attacking your cohort. Yes. And I don't know how that balance works out in the long term. It's extremely complicated to maintain. And you can see how difficult it is for them because it effectively took them the better part of 15 years. to get to this point, and this point is not even really functioning that well. Like, the people that I was just talking about who are, like, photoshopping Charlie Kirk's face onto porn stars,

they never liked Charlie Kirk. They were sort of the right of the right. So, like, this coalition is very loose. But I think the simplest answer to your question is self-loathing is very powerful. And you can see this a lot with, like, right-wing accounts on X, well, where they are clearly like a hentai addicted freak who is talking about like restoring like Western Christian values. I mean, you can see this with like the Jeffrey Epstein email leaks where it's like all these right wing dudes are like doing something with a bunch of underage girls in like cabana houses and like writing poetry to

each other about it. There's such a core of self-loathing to the entire right wing project. And so it doesn't totally surprise me that right as they sort of put video games in their crosshair, so to speak, they also figured out a way to start radicalizing and recruiting from those very video game players. Yeah. Because it's such an easy story to tell. And our like, 4chan is nothing but an infinite pit of misery and self-loathing. It is not hard in my mind to imagine someone like Steve Bannon or Malianopoulos going into those spaces and being like, you're a worthless piece of shit. And everything that you care about is violent and dangerous.

But wouldn't it be great if like the president knew what you're meaning? were and like talk to you that way and then maybe one day in the future you can be big and strong and not be staring at hentai all day i'm drawing a line now that we're the that we're wrapping up also now everyone knows that this is a bullshit conversation it's like every time there's a match like we've given up everyone knows that the game is that the game is over there's no interest in fixing anything but you got to say something to stop the conversation or change the conversation when there's a school shooting so like if you're an alt-right video game player who's spending all your time doing that and then you see that they're saying video games are the problem you go well they no one's gonna touch my video games so it doesn't fucking matter like like they can just ignore the dangling keys because they're still like their porn hasn't been taken away their video games haven't been taken away so like those words they can just ignore because like they're united and like the hating of women that is so spot on and

that my family in the Midwest who followed Trump, the excuse is always, oh, he's just saying that. That thing, he's just saying. But the things that we like, he means, until it happens to come for you. Okay. Well, that's appropriately sad. I think there's an unspoken second sort of point that you will see articulated in really, really extreme spaces, which is like, if Trump tomorrow was like, we're going to ban video games,

the assumption from a lot of his more extreme followers is like, well, for everyone else. And that is like the idea is like we're going to elevate, you know, the most racist chuds possible to the top. And they can watch anime and play video games and then they'll be worshipped for it, but no one else will be able to. which is like such a powerful projection of my own self-loathing. It's like, we're going to police the rest of society and not let them do what I do. And I'll keep doing it. And they'll like, and then I'll be at the top though, so it won't matter. It's such a, it's such a complicated, like psychology to put out.

And it works so well. It's like J.D. Vans with all of his boyfriends. You know, he's able to, no. All right. Okay. I can cut that. It's fine. I think, I think we're back.

I mean, I agree. Yeah. Okay, what I will say, it is like J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance is in a lot of ways, sort of the archetype of this. He is a politician who grew up in the exact time period we've been talking about today in the height of anti-video game hysteria, the height of like evangelical Christian hysteria. And a lot of times he is repeating the same stuff, but with a little wink, a little like, yeah, we're going to do it, but not for you guys. A little sassy wink. Little JD. Little eyeline, eyeliner wink. Yeah. I guess to sort of put a cap on all of this, do you, okay, imagine we get to vote again

and imagine we don't have Republican in office. Okay. How do you see sort of like this story continuing? Like, do you think we're just going to be talking about this forever or do you think? Oh, yeah, of course. At least another 20 years. I mean, we didn't even talk about, you know, Hillary Clinton put forward the legislation that didn't go through in 2005. Obama requested Congress doing an investigation following a school shooting.

The legislation in California, I believe, came from a state senator, Leeland D, who amazingly was accused of smuggling, I think smuggling weapons or dealing firearms. It was found guilty of racketeering. So it's like you said, it's always for you, not for me or the opposite. So no, I think it's this isn't like a conservative thing. This is a, it's an easy thing to point at for now. I think what will change is the stuff that I mentioned like, hey, we should really investigate gambling in video games, especially free to play games that are targeted towards kids. I think we are very slowly starting to see movement on that.

And I think we're seeing major publishers actually preemptively prepare for it. That's a real threat that is going to come into the station. And I suppose it's worth running through just like an around the world section here just because it is kind of interesting. Because this is not specifically an American problem. So the UK, they had a big blow up over there. The very sick. I remember this game. Carmageddon.

Do you remember that game? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, death race to Carmageddon, man. I feel like every 20 years we get a game where you just drive over people with your car. It's a loser. I loved Carmageddon. And the UK demanded a version of the game where all the blood from the people you're running over is green.

And that was in the late 90s in the 2010s used Beckastan attempts to ban a group of games, including Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat, but also the Sims for distorting values. Let's see Japan Really quickly of the time doesn't change I don't know if you saw the new prey movie Pre-Badlands I haven't seen it yet But we're still living in this world

Where it's like you just change the color of the blood There are humans that have white blood In the movies so I guess they're like Android They're Android's yeah they're androids The number of decapitations in this movie Is all-time high shit Our movie PG-13 whatever you want to call it You change the color of the blood

And the NPA is like Like, our job here is done. Yeah, they're cool with it. We're good. Yeah, just to finish this out, Mortal Kombat 11 doesn't get released in Japan, Indonesia, or Ukraine. It's banned later in China and Korea. In the early 2020s, the Taliban is invading Afghanistan, right? As Players Unknown Battleground or PubG is getting popular.

And hilariously, both the Afghan government and the Taliban agree that it's bad. and the Taliban when they take over eventually ban PubG, which is just great. And yeah, I think you're right. I think this stuff will just continue to happen. It is, it is a fear of governments around the world as if,

yeah, Carmageddon, oh, God, it was so good. I wanted to shoot up Bachtard with you because it's beautiful. I totally forgot about this game. I lost so many hours to this game. And I did not become a school shooter,

by the way. Yeah, you just have a jilted, girlfriend and a jilted producer because you're busy playing video games instead of paying attention to us i have never committed vehicular homicide and i i did so many hours in carmigandt and just mowing down random civilians oh my god what a game grant can i just say how cute it is that you put yourself right alongside yeah i was so i was not going to touch that one i was just ignoring that because like i was like i don't like during our next couple's therapy session me and grant can talk about it

um you're putting that on the patreon right we are yeah yeah absolutely um it's right it's right right up there with grant's workout videos that they want to um 3 000 patrons and i will upload the workout videos we're a thousand away get a thousand of your friends but remember the rule is you're not allowed to speak in them you just you just have to silently work out in front of the i don't fucking speak when i work out i'm locked in yeah i wanted to i wanted to feel like security camera footage um okay chris where can people follow you online oh Thank you so much for asking. If you want more of this, you can find me at post.games.

We just download postgames on your favorite podcast app of choice. It's a delightful show. And one day I'll have you both on, maybe for some couples therapy. Yeah, bring us on. Armageddon. I would talk about any of you games that I'm aware of and play. Great. The Tomicagotchi, which is very small.

But I have a steam deck, you know, so I can get a game to play for the show. You've got GamerCrad. Don't worry. I'll get you set up. Okay, cool. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Devin Barone, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus.

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